Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher- July 19, 2010

Alpher discusses why the Gaza blockade lasted so long, and analyses the phenomena of

right-wing Israeli politicians going on record in support of a one-state solution.

Q. With the Gaza land blockade partially lifted by the Netanyahu government, it is now broadly acknowledged that it was long counterproductive or, at best, useless. Was it maintained over the past three years due simply to bureaucratic inertia?

A. No, the reasons for the prolonged blockade go deeper. True, the blockade was counterproductive, actually strengthening Hamas in Gaza and weakening its opponents. And it neither produced a prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit nor moderated Hamas' attitude toward joining the peace process or a unity government. But the fact that it took a major crisis--over the Gaza flotilla interception--to end the total blockade is testimony to the influence of the actors and dynamics that first promoted, then prolonged the blockade. Assessing them offers an important window into both regional and internal-Israeli political processes.

The first and most powerful cause for the prolonged delay was Egyptian and PLO pressure to maintain the blockade on Gaza. In today's reality, Cairo and Ramallah are Jerusalem's partners in the struggle to contain Palestinian Islamist extremism represented by Hamas. Throughout the period in question and to this day, Cairo has maintained its own partial but effective blockade on Gaza, particularly with regard to human traffic. From Egypt's standpoint, allowing Hamas access to Sinai and from there to Cairo would constitute an unacceptable and dangerous boost for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas.

True, the Egyptians and the PLO frequently paid lip service publicly to the plight of Gazan Palestinians under the blockade. But that is not what they quietly communicated to Israel.

A second cause was domestic Israeli: the need to contain and channel public pressure on the government to "do something" about Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas for the past four years. Arguing that the blockade would eventually help free the captured Israeli soldier enabled, first the Olmert government, then Netanyahu, to satisfy the public that something was indeed being done while rebuffing Hamas' exaggerated demands for release of its operatives held by Israel in exchange for Shalit. Even when it became obvious that the blockade was not softening Hamas' conditions, the public was fed slogans like "Gazan kids won't eat Bamba [a popular Israeli snack food] as long as Gilad can't". This explains why, upon relaxing the blockade following the flotilla affair, Netanyahu felt it necessary to reassure the public that his government would now redouble its effort to free Shalit, when in fact nothing of the sort has been undertaken.

Then there is the mistaken belief--prominent particularly but not only on the Israeli political right and shared by many in the West--that there are economic "solutions" for the Palestinian issue. Back in June 2007, in imposing a complete blockade, Israel and the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia) agreed, on the one hand, that the imposition of economic hardship on Gazans would bring about Hamas' downfall or at least would moderate its position regarding Israel and peace. On the other hand, substantial economic investment, spearheaded by Quartet envoy Tony Blair, would launch the West Bank on its way toward moderation, tranquility and peace with Israel. This approach to the West Bank corresponded with Netanyahu's "bottom up" peace-building approach.

In other words, and put crudely, Gazans would want peace because their stomachs were empty, while West Bankers would want peace because their stomachs were full.

Nothing that followed in Gaza substantiated the economic approach. As for the West Bank, a degree of prosperity hasn't hurt, but it also certainly hasn't concretely advanced Israeli-Palestinian peace. Indeed, all the historic evidence points to the outbreak of violence on the part of Palestinians, paradoxically, at times of prosperity. The 1936 Great Revolt against the British erupted when the standard of living was on the rise; so, in more recent times, did both intifadas.

A final factor, and the one most closely approximating bureaucratic inertia, is the toxic interaction between Israel's coalition political system and the Palestinian issue. Almost every ruling coalition for the past 20 years has been brought down by attempts to deal with the peace process or some other aspect of the conflict. Hence Netanyahu, like his predecessors, "needed" a serious crisis that generated heavy international pressure before he could risk dismantling the land blockade of Gaza without compromising coalition solidarity. This, even though he himself freely admitted that fully a year earlier he had recognized the need to effect radical change regarding what was clearly a counterproductive strategy.

Q. A number of prominent right-wing Israeli politicians have recently gone on record supporting a one-state solution in which the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank and East Jerusalem become Israeli citizens. How do you explain this?

A. This is a fascinating phenomenon, worthy of further interest and study. It was covered extensively in last weekend's Haaretz magazine.

In recent weeks, Knesset Speaker Rubi Rivlin, former minister of defense and foreign affairs Moshe Arens, and new Knesset member Tzipi Hotobeli have all spoken out in favor of examining the possibility of Israel annexing the West Bank and East Jerusalem and awarding citizenship rights to the Palestinian population.

All three figures are Likudniks and Revisionist-style Zionists. Arens, long retired, was the first to speak out and the others followed suit. I asked Arens directly whether he didn't see a contradiction between his Zionist beliefs and the seeming inevitability of Israel becoming an Arab-majority country if it annexes the West Bank. His reply seemed to integrate an optimism so far-reaching as to twist facts, Zabotinsky-style nineteenth century liberalism and a colonialist approach toward "natives" that systematically denies their national aspirations.

According to Arens, the two-state solution has failed, and with it Palestinian nationalism. The Palestinians are hopelessly divided: West Bank-Gaza, Fateh-Hamas, secular-religious. Jordan refuses to solve the Palestinian problem by taking back the West Bank because it fears the Palestinians (here Arens seemingly acknowledges that Palestinian nationalism is actually a powerful force). Consequently, Israel should at least examine the possibility of annexing the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

To support his idea, Arens accepts as fact two highly disputed assertions. One is that there are only 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, not 2.5 as the Palestinian Authority census bureau claims. Hence, by his count, giving them citizenship would raise the percentage of Arabs with Israeli citizenship from the current 18 percent to no more than 30 percent. This, he argues, would not endanger Israel's Jewish nature. Here we note that the 1.5 million figure has been put forth by right-wing Israelis and American Jews seeking to deflate the "demographic demon" motivating many of those Israelis who advocate two states, and that their calculations are in turn ridiculed by serious demographers.

The second disputed assertion is that Palestinians, if just given a chance, would like nothing more than to be productive citizens of Israel as currently constituted--a Jewish and democratic state. Here Arens refers to annual surveys conducted primarily by Prof. Sami Smooha of the University of Haifa, according to which some 70 percent of Israeli Arabs seek precisely such integration. The surveys are indeed noteworthy, but they don't explain why the elected Israeli Arab political leadership in the Knesset and municipalities, and the intellectual leadership, have all in recent years become increasingly extreme, to the point of negating Israel as a Jewish state and demanding variations of a binational state or a "state of all its citizens".

Arens' response to this paradox is to demand that the more extreme leaders of the Islamist movements in Israel be arrested and their movements outlawed as "seditious". Meanwhile, measures that exploit and emphasize the diversity of the Israeli Arab community--such as encouraging (how, he doesn't say) Negev Bedouin to define themselves in a non-Islamist context--can demonstrate that Palestinian Arabs are perfectly capable of integrating into Israel as a Jewish state with all the rights and obligations that this implies. If, in turn, this can be demonstrated¬¬--when, in Arens' words, an Arab child in the central Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm can look at the sky, see an Israel Air Force F-15 overhead and feel pride--then there is room to argue for annexation of the Arabs in the West Bank on the assumption that they, too, can be thoroughly Israelized.

Arens served briefly around 20 years ago as minister for Israeli Arab affairs. He is familiar with the Israeli Arab community. He believes that demographic-political arguments from the Israeli political left, center (Tzipi Livni) and even right (Avigdor Lieberman) in favor of taking strenuous territorial measures to reduce the Arab population of Israel within the framework of a two-state solution are "racist".

There are other, more cynical or realistic (depending on one's viewpoint) explanations for the new phenomenon of right-wingers prepared to expand Israel's Arab population. Rivlin states simply that he will do anything, including giving West Bank Palestinians Israeli citizenship, to avoid giving up the West Bank. But then he proceeds to describe a kind of condominium status for the West Bank, with separate Jewish and Arab parliaments. Hotobeli, like Arens, wants to wait a generation while anchoring the country's Jewish status constitutionally so that Arabs can't challenge it. And she refuses to recognize Palestinian national rights--only individual rights. Uri Elitzur, a prominent settler and former Netanyahu aide who broached the idea even before the politicians, insists Israel can remain a Jewish state with a large Arab minority.

All these "solutions" smell of condescension, ignorance about Palestinian nationalist aspirations and a refusal to recognize that demography would sooner or later bring about the Palestinization of Israel. Nor, under present circumstances, would even the most egalitarian offer of Israeli citizenship to West Bank Palestinians persuade the international community and Arab world to acquiesce in Israel ignoring Gaza's 1.5 million. These right-wing ideas appear in some form or other to be a rehash of autonomy offers of the Begin era.

I would add one additional observation that seemingly constitutes good news for the advocates of a two-state solution: right-wing circles are simply beginning to confront the inevitability of "losing" the West Bank, and consequently to panic. Certainly, this could explain the timing of these proposals.

It would also explain why a prominent West Bank religious settler leader told me two weeks ago that he is beginning to contemplate remaining behind as a citizen of a Palestinian state, with all this implies in terms of the rule of Palestinian law over his community and himself. His explanation: international pressure now makes the emergence of a Palestinian state inevitable, and he would rather remain in his settlement than move back to Israel. At least this settler, whose despair pulls him in the opposition direction to Arens and Rivlin, seems to acknowledge the legitimacy (or perhaps only the inevitability) of Palestinian national aspirations.